The Power of Unreasonable Peopleby John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan Harvard Business School Press; €21.50. Reviewed by John Willman
Taking business beyond reason In this valid but unsatisfactory account social entrepreneurs are depicted as potential saviours of mankind, provided conventional business can learn from them, writes John Willman
The advancement of the human race depends on unreasonable people, the playwright George Bernard Shaw said in his Maxims for Revolutionists at the end of Man and Superman: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Entrepreneurs have often been seen by their contemporaries as unreasonable. Think of Henry Ford, paying workers twice the going rate to mass produce identical black cars by the million. Or the pioneers behind low-cost airlines such as Southwest Airlines and Ryanair who launched discount flights with none of the frills offered by traditional carriers. Or Sir James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, who had to create his own company to make it.
John Elkington, founder of UK-based think tank SustainAbility, and Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, argue that humankind's future now depends on one particular new group of unreasonable people. They are the social entrepreneurs striving to solve the knotty economic, social and environmental problems facing the modern world.
These pioneers are "disrupting existing industries, value chains and business models" to find solutions to poverty and hunger, the threat of global pandemics and climate change.
More important for many, their skills must be harnessed by conventional businesses if they are to adapt to the risks and opportunities that now face the world.
This is not often easy, precisely because such people are, well, unreasonable. They are usually impatient with bureaucracies and prepared to take big risks to tackle seemingly intractable problems. Their goals of sustainable development and social justice appear to challenge existing ways of doing business.
Their solutions are often small-scale, tailor-made and dependent on informal networks alien to the modern corporation.
Yet the most successful, identified in this book, have changed for the better the lives of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
One of the best-known is Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel prize-winning founder of Grameen Bank, which pioneered microfinance and inspired imitators around the world. He has now created new businesses, such as Grameenphone, which built the largest cellular network in Bangladesh with the Village Phone Program to provide access to telecommunications in the countryside.
Victoria Hale's OneWorld Health develops new drugs for diseases that affect the world's poorest people, such as leishmaniasis. David Green's Aurolab has become one of the largest manufacturers of eye lenses used to deal with cataracts, selling for less than $4 (€2.70) lenses that would cost $150 in developed countries. Nicholas Negroponte of Massachusetts Institute of Technology is behind a $100 laptop that would be affordable for the poorest young people on the globe.
Many big companies have already grasped the environmental and social challenge. Large banks such as HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are among those working to reduce their carbon footprints and finance new technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Retailers such as Wal-Mart of the US and the UK's Marks & Spencer are working with suppliers to ensure products are made ethically and with less environmental impact.
But few have so far addressed the greatest opportunities that lie among the four billion people who live on less than $2 a day - the so-called "base of the pyramid". Their purchasing power is $5,000 billion a year according to the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank.
And there is money to be made in meeting their needs - something the most successful social entrepreneurs emphasise in seeking resources to scale up operations.
The aim of this book is to help conventional businesses work with those entrepreneurs and to learn from the way they work.
The authors are notable in seeing no clash between the ends social entrepreneurs are seeking to achieve and the market system.
As a book, it is far from satisfactory. Written in the leaden style of many US business magazines, it cries out for more colourful accounts of the heroes it writes about and how they overcame obstacles. It also mixes true entrepreneurs such as those above with campaigners such as Peter Eigen of Transparency International and Bob Massie, who launched the Global Reporting Initiative. The latter have made an impact through their ingenuity and single-mindedness, but can hardly be described as entrepreneurs.
Yet there is no doubting the validity of the message. An increasingly crowded world is full of danger and challenges. The market system can solve those problems far more effectively than government action - provided the businesses that operate within it learn from these unreasonable people. - (Financial Times service)
